


The Ski Queen

by Meriah



Category: Original Work
Genre: Acceptance, Alaska, Alcohol, Coming of Age, Death, Gen, Illness, Memories, liver disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 18:50:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1195689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meriah/pseuds/Meriah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"With my mother's passing, I would come to search for her in the sunlight upon my skin or in the rustling breeze through the trees. My fingers would cross over the diamond on her engagement ring as if I could sense her presence within it. And I would cry – a loud, infantile sound broken with gasps for breath – as if somehow my desperation could summon her back to me. On winter nights, I have looked for her through reading her high school diary while I sit on my bed, tears blotting the paper. In the summer, I have walked the woods of Massachusetts she most loved in the company of only the songbirds. And I have asked questions about her to relatives over the phone, e-mail, or when pulled aside at a gathering. I have watched films about Alaska too, of course, as if they could bring me closer to her."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ski Queen

**Author's Note:**

> Everything stated in this story actually happened -- nothing was made up. As is such, I ask that you be empathetic if you choose to leave a review.

**The Ski Queen**

 

There is a photograph of my mother from her time in Alaska illustrating a child I would only know as a woman. I can determine from the black and white ink that the scene was sometime in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. She stood at the top of a hill, her hallmark crooked teeth as her most identifiable feature, dressed in a jacket, goggles, and ski pants. Two ski poles were set in her hands, accompanied by crown upon her head as if she were a matriarch of some winter wonderland. Despite Mom’s attention to preservation, the photograph bares symptoms of aging: it is yellowed and frayed at the edges, and across it runs an uneven surface like a relief map.           

 

I had looked upon the photograph for years. It was always on the wall in the den of our house, where I had lived until the summer of 2007. Yet upon my parents’ separation and our house being sold, somehow the item was tucked away in a cardboard box. It was to be among the cobwebs and dust until I found it in two years later – an unintentional discovery that only came about through a routine cleaning.

 

When I discovered the photograph again, I brought it into the living room with scurried feet. Mom was asleep on the couch with _Little House on the Prairie_ playing on the television. The afternoon sun bleared through the windows as I awoke her with a light shake and the words, “Hey, Mom, remember this?”  

 

As if summoned on command, she awoke as her body turned toward me. She did not reply to my question. Instead she asked while her eyes adjusted to the light, “What time is it?”

 

“It’s the middle of the day. It’s a little after 2.”

 

“Oh.” She pulled the blanket up toward her face. A yawn released from deep within her. “Wake me up in a little while, okay?”

 

“You should stay up. You’ve been asleep all day. Let me get you something.”

 

I made it through our small apartment to the kitchenette to gather a sandwich with juice. Then I returned to her, slipping artificial cheer into my voice as I asked her, “So how do you feel today?” I knew the answer would be the same – “I’m fine” – although in truth she was ill. In fact, she was dying. And so above all, more than anything, such conversations were what I had to share with her during her final months – the words that I could carry forever.

 

She took a slight bite out of the sandwich and chewed at a slow pace. Her appetite had diminished throughout the progression of her disease, as had her liver’s ability to absorb vital nutrients. I remembered her plump during my childhood, her backside facing me as she pulled out a roast beef from the oven. Food was once her pleasure; now it was difficult for her to eat.

 

She took a sip of water, and then sat upward to look at me.

 

I passed her the photograph. “Do you remember this picture?”

 

Her eyes were dull in those last months. Yet that moment they glistened with moisture. She said with a soft smile, “yes, I remember.” Her roughened hands traveled across the item; it seemed to me that she attempted to experience the occasion once again.

 

“What do you remember?”

 

“I was the ski queen. I won that competition. I was faster than all the boys and girls.”

 

It quickly hit me that I had never once skied, despite having lived near a ski area the majority of my life. That simple fact was one of the things that differentiated me from my mother, who was then across from me with her frail hands grasping a sandwich with utmost energy.

 

“I loved it there… well, not the winters,” she confessed with a laugh. “But the winters weren’t as horrible as people make them sound like. They were cold, but dry. They didn’t eat at your bones like the wet crap in Michigan.” She continued to study the photograph, her eyes transfixed upon the familiar face. “Shame that I don’t ski anymore.”

 

Mom took another sip of water, lost in the endless realm of memory. I wanted to ask if she imagined her life would be forever changed. A thread within my heart pulled at me, eager for knowledge. What did she think as she gazed at the photograph? Did she ever imagine that she would lose her own mother right before her wedding day? Did she believe the doctors when years ago they said her brother and sister would lose their lives early to Wilson’s disease and they were right? Did she conceptualize that her husband would later physically abuse and eventually leave her? With this abundance of traumas, surely it was understandable that she became an alcoholic… and yet at that time, I failed to see it in such a way.

 

What did she think about becoming a mother?

 

These were all questions of great significance that I wanted to ask, made clear by the burning sensation that ascended from my hands to my face. Yet something barricaded me from doing so.

 

“Let me tell you about Alaska,” she said as she placed down the glass of water.

 

According to her, Alaska was a sacred place. Evergreens dotted the landscape for countless miles, with a backdrop of mountains against gray sky. She told me of the glaciers, the unyielding tide in confrontation with the shoreline, and the calling of wolves.

 

Mom was the daughter of an Army major, a hero of two wars, and as such never knew the meaning of one home. Childhood existed within suitcases and boxes. Her earliest days stretched back to Arkansas, then Texas, Washington, Alaska, Michigan, and eventually Massachusetts. Yet it was Alaska that she spoke of with love in her voice as I formed an image of her young self in my mind: a German-Scandinavian beauty, running through lupine meadows with the wind in her hair and flowers grazing the seam of her dress. And I imagined her in the winter too, fighting those mountains with her skis and red-hot determination.

 

The photograph unearthed a memory, illustrated a scene, and told a story. It symbolized when she felt indestructible, as if her body would always be an eternal machine.

 

Unfortunately, disease attacked my mother during her final years. It is challenging to remember her in other ways. Jaundice colored her in a sickly greenish-yellow and turned her sclera golden. Her veins bulged in long steams of blue, while bruises journeyed down her frail body. She was thin – bony, in fact – except for her bloated abdomen to signify that her life was on a timer.

 

It was as if she were a stranger. I wanted to remember her as the German-Scandinavian beauty with her smile offset by crooked teeth and the ability to fall into Arkansas-bred southern drawl when in the middle of a joke. But in 2009 she was a broken version of her original self. Once an extrovert, vibrant with energy, she fought obstacles, and although exhausted it never appeared unless she drank from the bottle. There was pain she carried, obscured by giggles.

 

I looked at her, and then reality crashed upon me. Lethargy had claimed her, obvious by her heavy-lidded eyes and constant yawns. She could not finish the small meal. My mother was falling apart at the seams. No longer was she the woman I admired. Her fat was replaced by malnutrition as skin dangled from her. She turned weak, barely able to embrace me.

 

The woman coughed laboriously, the sound of her lungs seemingly audible through her chest. “I need to take it easy, Val. Let me watch TV.”

 

She had spent over a year on the couch with her focus upon _Little House on the Prairie._ Visions of the pioneer age traversed through her mind; they comforted her through what became her daily life. 

 

“Mom, you just watched this episode. It was on earlier,” I commented in a flat tone.

 

“No, I didn’t.”

 

“Yes… yes, you did. This was on an hour ago.” Then in detail, I explained what happened to Laura, Nellie, and the other school children.           

 

She responded with praise in her voice, “You have a great memory.”

 

I pierced down on my lip with my teeth. My hands tightened. She truly had no recollection of having watched the episode only sixty minutes prior! I looked around the room, too stunned to say anything. Then I closed in my gaze on the bottle of lactulose on the coffee table, its white surface made brighter by the sun. The substance was meant to help with Mom’s confusion… why did it appear to have done nothing?

 

Silence perpetrated the room. There was nothing more to say. I took her plate – she refused to touch any more of the sandwich, and asked for it to be wrapped up – then went into the kitchenette for my own lunch. By the time I finished my own lunch, Mom had been overcome by sleep. She breathed in and outward, her mouth open and her posture rigid.

 

* * *

 

 

The next afternoon I once again sat across from my mother in the living room. She drank water as usual, adjusting herself to ambrosia rather than poison. I wondered if she longed for it to be vodka, but quickly I dismissed the selfish thought.

 

“If there was something you could do again, what would it be?” I asked.

 

She set the glass down, looked upward. Then she forced herself to sit straight upward, her body supported by two arms pressed into the couch. “I would love to see Alaska again. Did I tell you about when I was the ski queen?”

 

Memory had failed her. It was as if the conversation from yesterday never happened.

 

The lactulose was still on the table.

 

For a brief moment, the thought of telling her that such conversation had recently occurred swept across my mind. Yet instead, I asked with the same curled smile I inherited from her, “What did you like about being the ski queen?”

 

“I was the fastest. And I was so proud of myself when I came home with that crown.”

 

Swathed in a quilt, she appeared like a baby. It was difficult to picture that twenty-two years prior I was in her arms, nursing from her breast.

 

I bent forward with my legs crossed. Then I said as a white lie, “Maybe someday you will go to Alaska again.”

 

We made small talk in those final months. There was a chill that came between us if I pressured for answers to the deepest questions; an unmovable rock that blocked me from her innermost thoughts. She never expressed her fear in dying or what would become of me. She never said anything about the absence of my father, of unfilled accomplishments, or even what she expected of me. Hell, I never asked.

 

* * *

 

With her passing, I would come to search for her in the sunlight upon my skin or in the rustling breeze through the trees. My fingers would cross over the diamond on her engagement ring as if I could sense her presence within it. And I would cry – a loud, infantile sound broken with gasps for breath – as if somehow my desperation could summon her back to me. On winter nights, I have looked for her through reading her high school diary while I sit on my bed, tears blotting the paper. In the summer, I have walked the woods of Massachusetts she most loved in the company of only the songbirds. And I have asked questions about her to relatives over the phone, e-mail, or when pulled aside at a gathering. I have watched films about Alaska too, of course, as if they could bring me closer to her.           

 

Now in the present, my fingers reach for the photograph of my mother as the ski queen with gingerly care. She stands tall with the poles by her sides, the crown upon her like royalty from folklore. This is how I want to remember her – an individual of pride and substance. I am deluding myself when I claim she survives only now in this photograph, in my toothy smile or in my hearth of memories. She was my foundation for who I was and who I am now – that distant voice that still speaks to me in the chasms of my mind. And while it is now impossible to have particular questions answered about her, the desire to continue to learn of her burns strong.

 

Perhaps one day I will make it to Alaska to experience for myself why it was Mom's sacred place. Like her, perhaps I will look upon the vista of mountains and glaciers while feeling the energy of the ocean as it pulsates like the earth's heart. Until then, I know her spirit lives on somewhere – and with my memories of her as my compass, I will navigate onward until I learn of her in ways I never knew. For now, my soul will continue to be drawn to the Land of the Midnight Sun with its enchanting visions of taiga surrendering to tundra. Only stories are what I have to judge, and due to this it is possible that Alaska has always symbolized purity to me – a virginal land untouched. Maybe if I were to see that state for myself, my romanticism would turn into logic – that Alaska is like anywhere else on the planet. No, perhaps I would agree that Alaska is unique.

 

I remember when Mom said, “Alaska is a sacred place. I was the ski queen.”


End file.
